Update

Doomsday rumours

THE world will end around the time this issue of Frontline reaches readers - or so believed a number of people and it created something of a meltdown of the established economic order in parts of western India.

The panic began after a New Delhi-based Hindi magazine carried in a supplement that it published in mid-April a doomsday prophecy, which said the world would come to an end on May 8. Word appears to have spread rapidly through communities of migrant workers from the Hindi-speaking States. Marathi, Gujarati and other vernacular newspapers reproduced the predictions and added to the panic.

The most widespread word-of-mouth version was that devastation would come in the form of a massive earthquake, somehow related to the unusually intense summer heat. These predictions were also wrongly claimed to have been broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corporation's radio services.

PAUL NORONHA
Workers at Alang.

Among the areas worst hit by the prophecy was the shipbreaking port of Alang in Gujarat. Reports suggested that thousands of workers packed their bags and returned to their villages, saying that they wished to die at home.

Desperate efforts by the authorities at Alang to convince them that astrological predictions were incorrect had little effect since the Maritime Board had put up storm warnings along the coast around the same time. Some workers stayed on, lured by spiralling wage payments; however, Bhavnagar District Administration officials estimated that over 80 per cent of workers had left Alang. Several projects in Maharashtra and Gujarat were affected by such exodus, but on a smaller scale.

Popular responses to the doomsday prophecy open up several interesting interpretative possibilities. In the case of Alang, notorious for horrendous occupational hazards and oppressive working conditions, the prophecy may have offered the workers an opportunity to protest. Then, summer is traditionally a time when migrant workers head home and this factor may have been sharpened by the rumours.

The doomsday prophecy is the latest in a series of similar recent episodes, the most dramatic of them being the mass hysteria whipped up in the autumn of 1995 by widely reported claims that idols of Ganesha had begun to drink milk (Frontline, October 7, 1995). The word Allah in the Arabic script was subsequently claimed to have been found in such unlikely media as aubergines, and similar "miracles" have been reported from some Christian communities. The organic link between such rumours and communal politicians had come to notice in the past. In a larger sense, the doomsday rumour has accentuated the need for a serious study of the systems through which rumours travel and acquire virtual credibility.

Praveen Swami